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Donate: Send your tax deductible donations to:
Get Involved: This is addressed primarily to those living on or near the C3ETP corridor, but anyone living anywhere can help fight this PG&E menace. Anyone living anywhere can help. You don't have to live in the Sierra foothills to help save the foothills from the PG&E invasion. Anyone living anywhere can help by signing our petition and voting in our poll. Anyone living anywhere can join Save the Foothills Coalition as a supporting member simply by sending your name and email to us at wattsvalleypreservation@gmail.com so that we can add you to our growing list of supporters. There are no membership dues for supporting members. Numbers is the name of the game, and the bigger our list of supporters, the more clout we have when we talk with the politicians, the commissions, and the utilities. If you have been notified by PG&E that you own property on the C3ETP study corridor or have discovered you own property on the corridor or near the cooridor but not on it, it is in your interest to contact Save the Foothills immediately and become a sustaining member. Simply use the phone number and/or email provided below. Our careful study of the history of dealing with PG&E in issues like C3ETP has shown us that it does not pay to oppose PG&E on your own. PG&E wants to deal with us one at a time. They know that if they can deal with us separately, the best we can hope for is a little more money for our property. No, stopping this plan and protecting ourselves against similar future plans will take many people working together in solidarity. Separate, we are like single twigs--easy to break. United, we become a solid, mighty oak, very hard to cut down. The end game of C3ETP will be the California Public Utilities Commission Hearings, which will come, if all goes as PG&E hopes, in about 18 months more or less. If PG&E sees that we are strong and united, they might give up before we get to the hearings. But we can't count on that. 18 months may seem like a long time. It's not. We are learning how difficult it is to organize. It takes time and effort. We must use this time to prepare. In our area in Fresno County north of the Kings River, we have formed a steering committee to plan our organization. We have over 150 members in our area. We will probably have dues and are now in the process of deciding the amount and structure of our dues. It will take a war chest to fight PG&E and pay for the necessary tools for successful demonstrations and other operations. Legal counsel will be an important asset at the CPUC hearings. Legal counsel costs money. We think it is best for other areas to develop their own sub-organizations and work in coordination with ours, all of us united in the umbrella organization Save the Foothills Coalition. Each group should decide on its own structure. We want to share power with other groups. We do not want to dictate. This is not about our egos; this is about our property, our foothills, and our lives. We have people now actively working in the Squaw Valley area south of the Kings River in Fresno County working to organize people in Wonder Valley, Dunlap, and Squaw Valley. We will soon be meeting with members in the Squaw Valley area to help them in their efforts. If you own property in Tulare or Kern County, we want to talk with you, so please call us or email us using the contact information at the bottom of this page. If we can form a solid organization all along the route, we have a good chance of stopping this project from going through our foothills. We also wish to form alliances with other groups with similar goals of protecting the foothills. We invite communication with such groups, so if you belong to a like-minded group please use our contact information below. We can work something out. We can help each other. II. Contact the Power Brokers Please use the links provided on this site to contact the various politicians and commissions about your opposition to C3ETP. Phone calls, emails, and letters to the various power brokers is essential. At this time, it is important to contact your California Assembly and State Senate representatives in addition to your Congressional representative. The contact information is provided on our links page. In addition, since the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) is now overseeing the planning of C3ETP, we need to send emails to regionaltransmission@caiso.com . Up to now, industry players have dominated the "stakeholder" or planning process. But as a land owner on the route and a rate-payer you are a stakeholder too, and we can influence the planning by writing to regionaltransmission@caiso.com and telling them you do not believe the planning process has been fair and that not enough realistic alternatives have been considered. Just a short email like that will do. Of course, if you want to study the planning so far as represented in the documents available on the CAISO site, please do. The more knowledge we have of this plan, the greater our power against it. Please join us! You can phone us at (559) 855-6376 Email: Chip Ashley at wattsvalleypreservation@gmail.com Joyce Berube at sierrasaver.joyce@gmail.com | ||
